NIST PREP Research Associate in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Robotics Engineering

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). NIST recognizes that its research staff may want to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest and, therefore, requires those institutions to be recipients of a PREP award. The PREP program involves staff from a wide range of backgrounds conducting scientific research across various fields. Individuals in this position will perform technical work supporting the collaboration’s scientific research.

Research Title: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Robotics Engineer / NIST GenAI Research Associate

The work will entail: This position involves providing software and web development support for evaluation activities in the Artificial Intelligence Group (774.02) at NIST. Specifically, the work will support NIST GenAI evaluation series (https://ai-challenges.nist.gov/genai).

The candidate will assist in developing cutting-edge human assessment infrastructure and social cognition assessments that support evaluations in various modalities (such as text, voice, image, and video). The infrastructure includes a web platform, evaluation pipeline (backend/frontend), database schema, and other related tasks. The development includes datasets using frontier AI/LLM tools, conducting experiments, performing statistical analysis, and writing technical reports. The candidate will work alongside NIST researchers to advance measurement science through cutting-edge research and evaluations in the field of Generative AI.

U.S. Citizen Preferred

Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

• Evaluating Agentic AI applications in robotics and drones within the manufacturing sector.
• Analyzing AI‑generated content by extracting linguistic, syntactic, semantic, and structural features, and using computational methods to compare LLM judgments with human perception and behavioral responses.
• Engineering prompt pipelines to generate controlled AI-generated content across models and other experimental conditions
• Apply pre/post-processing techniques for adversarial attacks on signals from multiple modalities (Audio, Image, and Text)
• Apply signal analysis methods (information theory, topological data analysis, spectral methods) on high-dimensional representation spaces
• Upgrade, maintain, and develop NIST GenAI software and evaluation pipelines.
• Develop baseline systems to benchmark AI models on synthetic content generation and detection.
• Curate datasets for synthetic content detection, aligned with real-world forensic applications.
• Managing data, such as querying and translating data formats/specifications.

Qualifications

This individual must have the following minimum knowledge, skills, and abilities:

• Proficiency in shell scripts (Bash, etc.) and coding (e.g., Python, Java, Java Script, R, C and C++).
• Proficiency in database management (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB).
• Background in robotics engineering or AI evaluations involving LLM as judge, study design, and data analysis
• Real-time code development using a distributed computing environment.
• Experience in applying machine learning and deep learning methods to audio and image processing tasks
• Experience with Computer Vision and Array Signal Processing (adaptive and non-adaptive filtering)
• Experience with open-source and API-based AI models in the domain of synthetic data.
• Experience in statistical analysis methods to test and compare AI models on forensic tasks.
• Experience with signal processing techniques like Cosine, Fourier, and Wavelet transforms for feature extraction of digital and time-series data.
• Experience using GPU-accelerated clusters and CUDA for deploying open-source models.
• Experience using cloud computing (such as Azure and GCP) and integrating cloud-based APIs.
• Mastery of the principles, practices, methods in a specialty of a technical professional field (in science, AI/ML engineering, computer science, robotics engineering, information technology, or mathematics, or related field).

Furthermore, the following knowledge skills, and abilities are preferred:

• Previous Experience in a full-stack web developer with tools potentially including using Ruby on Rails: Rails5, Postgres, HTML/CSS, Javascript
• Experience with jupyter notebooks, R, Shiny and interactive plots
• Experience in Cross platform software development (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows)
• Experience/interest in machine learning and AI test and evaluation

Privacy Act Statement
Authority:  15 U.S.C. § 278g-1(e)(1) and (e)(3) and 15 U.S.C. § 272(b) and (c)
Purpose:  The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) hosts the  Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) which is designed to provide valuable laboratory experience and financial assistance to undergraduates, post-bachelor’s degree holders, graduate students, master’s degree holders, postdocs, and faculty.
PREP is a 5-year cooperative agreement between NIST laboratories and participating PREP Universities to establish a collaborative research relationship between NIST and U.S. institutions of higher education in the following disciplines including (but may not be limited to) biochemistry, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, electronics, materials science, mathematics, nanoscale science, neutron science, physical science, physics, and statistics. This collection of information is needed to facilitate administrative functions of the PREP Program.
Routine Uses: NIST will use the information collected to perform the requisite reviews of the applications to determine eligibility, and to meet programmatic requirements. Disclosure of this information is also subject to all the published routine uses as identified in the Privacy Act System of Records Notices: NIST-1: NIST Associates.
Disclosure: Furnishing this information is voluntary. When you submit the form, you are indicating your voluntary consent for NIST to use of the information you submit for the purpose stated.

SURA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that no one should be discriminated against because of their differences, such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, or sexual orientation. All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law.

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